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Q&A: 2008 Templeton Prize winner

By Amanda Gefter

Cosmologist and Catholic priest Michael Heller

(Image: Templeton Foundation)

At £820,000, the Templeton Prize for Progress toward Research or Discoveries about Spiritual Realities is the biggest science prize around – and one of the most controversial. This year’s winner is Michael Heller, a Polish cosmologist and Catholic priest, who is being recognised for his work on whether the universe needs a cause. Amanda Gefter asked him how he manages to unite his religious beliefs with his research.

What does this prize mean to you?

I feel very happy, a little surprised and a little out of tune because it somehow interferes with what I love best&colon; quiet work in science and philosophy. On the other hand I appreciate the prize because it opens new possibilities for me in the fields of science and religion.

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Why is it so important to you to combine these two fields?

My father used to say that it is important to combine science and religion because these are the two most important activities for the future of humanity. Science gives us knowledge of the world and religion gives us meaning. Living in the Communist regime was another motive for me because Communist propaganda was strongly anti-religious in a brutal way. Their arguments were naïve but quite efficient so when I was studying physics and philosophy in Poland I also studied Marxist philosophy very carefully because I wanted to know the arguments.

What do you make of the current debate between science and religion, in which the two are often presented as mutually exclusive?

Everything depends on your concept of rationality. Science is a model of rationality. The question is whether the limits of rationality coincide with limits of the scientific method. If they do, then there is no place for religion or theology because everything outside of the scientific method is automatically irrational. On the other hand, if you agree that they do not coincide then there is a place for rational religious belief. If you look at the recent history of science and philosophy, you can see that the dominating philosophy in western countries was positivistic, it said that the scientific method is identical with rationality and that what’s beyond the scientific method is beyond rationality. Nowadays very few philosophers agree with this; we are more pluralistic.

In your statement today you said&colon; “Things thought through by God should be identified with mathematical structures interpreted as structures of the world.” Does that mean that you see mathematics as the language of God?

In a word, yes. One of my heroes is Leibniz, the great philosopher of the 17th century. In the margin of his work entitled Dialogus there is a short handwritten remark in Latin that says, “When God calculates and thinks things through, the world is made.” My philosophy is encapsulated in that.

The Templeton Foundation has said that you “initiated what can be justly termed the theology of science”. What is the theology of science?

Science is about investigating the world. The method of physics is selective – some aspects of the world are investigated by physics and some are not. Anything that cannot be put into mathematical structures is transparent to the methods of physics. But theology and philosophy can look at the same universe with different eyes; they can contemplate other aspects of the world, such as values. In my view theology of science should take into account that not everything in the world can be investigated by science.

You have said that proponents of intelligent design are committing a grave theological error. Can you explain that?

The standard theory of evolution ascribes a lot of results to chance, whereas adherents of intelligent design say that instead everything should be planned by God. What is a random event? It is something which is of low probability which nevertheless happens. But in order to know whether something is of low or high probability you have to use the calculus of probability, a non-random mathematical structure. So chance events are still part of God’s mind. I don’t see any conflict between chance events and God’s planning of the universe.

You have done a lot of research into whether the universe requires a cause. Have you come up with an answer?

I recently wrote a book on this called The Ultimate Explanations of the Universe. Cause and effect is one of the most important explanations in the sciences. For any physical process you can always discover a sequence of states such that a preceding state is a cause for a following state which is its effect, and there is always a physical law which describes how this process develops. If you ask about the cause of the universe you’re really asking, what is the cause of physical laws? Then you’re back to Leibniz. He asked, why is there something rather than nothing? My answer is that indeed the universe needs a cause but this cause is unlike any other cause investigated by science because it is the cause of existence itself.

What are you working on these days?

I am working on a fundamental problem in physics&colon; unifying general relativity [which describes the large-scale effects of gravity], and quantum mechanics [which applies to sub-atomic scales]. With some colleagues from Warsaw I have created a model based on noncommutative geometry, which is an extremely interesting new branch of mathematics. In general relativity, spacetime is modeled as a smooth manifold [or sheet] – that’s ordinary commutative geometry. But there are other algebras that are not commutative. In spacetimes that contain a singularity the manifold breaks down, so you can’t use ordinary geometry. Our fundamental result is that at the smallest scale the geometry of space is noncommutative and nonlocal and it is probabilistic. When you describe the space probabilistically, singularities turn out to occupy a set of measure zero, which essentially means that singularities don’t exist at that level. They only appear at the macroscopic level as a kind of construct.

Some scientists have argued taking money from the Templeton Foundation – which assumes the existence of a creator – can undermine the integrity of scientific research. How do you respond to that?

I can only speak for myself. I never worked with the view of obtaining some reward from Templeton or anyone else. It is very welcome, but it has not undermined my scientific integrity. On the other hand you must take into account that there are very powerful institutions that pay for research at the other end of this story, for instance during our Communist regime in Eastern countries the state invested a lot of money into research to support atheistic propaganda.

What will you do with the money?

Even before I knew about the prize my colleagues in Krakow and I had plans to create an institute that would combine research in the fields of science, philosophy and theology. Our slogan is&colon; philosophy in science, rather than philosophy of science, which is a well-established academic discipline. Some big philosophical issues are now inside science. For instance, concepts of time and space or determinism and causality, they were once philosophical concepts but are now essential issues in science. We decided to create an institute joining two universities in Krakow, Jagiellonian University and the Pontifical Academy of Theology. It will be called the Copernicus Centre. I will give all of my money from Templeton to this centre.

Michael Heller is a professor at the Pontifical Academy of Theology in Krakow and adjunct scholar at the Vatican Astronomical Observatory.